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Occupy Wall Street Monday

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Liberato’s Pizza has now officially renamed a pizza after the Occupy Wall Street action happening in a park in lower Manhattan in New York. The pizza is called The Occu-pie and it is 99% cheese, 1% pig.

On Saturday 17 September, many of us watched in awe as 5,000 Americans descended on to the financial district of lower Manhattan, waved signs, unfurled banners, beat drums, chanted slogans and proceeded to walk towards the "financial Gomorrah" of the nation. They vowed to "occupy Wall Street" and to "bring justice to the bankers", but the New York police thwarted their efforts temporarily, locking down the symbolic street with barricades and checkpoints.

Peter Daou, who lives in lower Manhattan is not covering this, nor are any of the New York lefty bloggers, nor are any of our NYC based Correntians. So, for whatever reason, this event does not appeal to our crowd.

I will try to be at Freedom Plaza on October 6. I hope our DC based Correntians will be there, at least after work or on the weekends.

Frankly, I doubt that the wearers even KNOW who Guy Fawkes is. They are the symbol of Anonymous (and, by "cultural" extension, "V for vendetta"). These are the symbols and rallying dress of the new wave of protest (rather like a DFH with a flag on the back end of his jeans).

"Folks are getting arrested......From Twitter.."NYPD cops are ripping tarps off of media equipment to ruin it and arresting members of the media". violent arrests being made-PLEASE Call NYPD and Bloomberg's office!!Tell them the world is watching!
NYPD 1st precinct-(212) 772-1081
Bloomberg- (212)772-1081, ext 12006

My concern: There seem to be some people who (as some tweeter Sunday night remarked) are not happy unless the police are being brutal. My experience with NYPD and demos is that they are generally sympathetic to our positions (they are union members and are paid by NYC after all, so suffer from the economic divisions also!) and most are very professional and just want to do their jobs. I have to say that I'm not seeing the "shocking" things I'm being asked to see in the videos I've seen, so far. So I'm a little skeptical, and alarmed.

In my first, and only so far, kettling experience in NYC, at the February 2003 rally against Bush invading Iraq, the beat cops were cool, chatty, funny, quite nice.

Until they were ordered to push us into four separate quadrants on the block. There was a lot of confusion as no one told us, the people, what we were expected to do, or what was going on. I went to the officer holding a bull horn and asked what he wanted people to do and gently suggested that if he made an explanation, people would cooperate.

He glared at me, turned the bull horn directly at my right ear, so close it almost touched, and yelled at me to get back to my group.

My ear hurt from the blast of sound, and I had trouble hearing in that ear for a long time.

Essentially, this officer assaulted me. If he had been a spouse, I probably could have brought charges.

So, yes, cops are nice -- until they're not so nice. Even NYC cops, cops in unions. Cops who ended up being sent to Iraq if they were in certain National Guard units. Cops who died for a war we were lied into.

BTW, these nice cops also didn't tell us there was no way for us to get to the rally when they told us to go to Third Avenue and keep moving north. My theory is Bloomberg wanted to practice crowd control, and we were guinea pigs.

I guess my point was mostly that if you go in looking for trouble you can usually find it. I'm not claiming NYPD are saints. I'm just saying that I don't think it's a good idea, or a useful organizing tactic, to assume they will be brutal or unreasonable.

the tweets were the sources of pretty much damning videos of over-reaction (or overt authoritarian action) by NYPD..and any familiarity with G20, or G30, makes one a little sensitive to violent, and randomly oppressive, police reactions to protests, see here, for example :-(

Really, even if you believe that the police are behaving badly with the demonstrators, calling the local precincts is a really BAD idea. You're tying up the lines for people who are trying to report things going on in the precinct, and the local precincts are only responsible for... well... their precinct.

Call One Police Plaza, sure. But the local precincts? Makes no sense, and can hurt.

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Beyond war, inflation, the end of the technology/productivity wave, and financial collapse, we think the most potent and short-term threat would be societies demanding a more ‘equitable’ share of wealth."

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